Why the World Needs Pink Raygun

Women in scifi, fantasy and horror haven’t had a great run in the past century or so. Uhura was groundbreaking, but didn’t do much as a character other than say, “Hailing frequencies open” and participate in television’s first interracial kiss. Ripley was also groundbreaking; however, she set the tone for women who kick ass in the future. After Ripley, women who kick ass often fell into pigeonholes, and became either overtly sexual or androgynous. How hard is it to write a female character that has an emotional range, knows how to use a machine gun as well as a curling iron, and isn’t a complete bitch? A character that has all of the strength and charisma that male leads are expected to have, yet maintains a core of girldom?

I launched Pink Raygun for two reasons: (1) I’m a girl who likes scifi, fantasy, horror and comic books and (2) there are no publications on the web or in print that address me. This past December, I was looking for places online where I could talk to other women about scifi, fantasy and horror. Ideally, I would have found a website or webcommunity that was somewhere between iVillage and the forums at the Scifi Channel.

The more searching I did, the more pissed off I became at the disregard toward fangirls. Running a Google search for “women in scifi”, looking for women who work in scifi, mostly delivers results like “The 25 Sexiest Women in Scifi” or “women of scifi calendar”. I couldn’t find a place that was geared toward women that wasn’t centered around discussion about representations of female oppression or wasn’t dominated by sweaty guys who will denigrate my posts because I’m a chick and somehow my brain power is directly proportionate to the size of my boobs.

Eventually the results will turn to articles written for publications like Salon.com or Slate.com discussing the new trend of women enjoying scifi. According to the British newspaper The Telegraph, women scifi fans outnumber men, citing Sci Fi UK’s 10% rise in female viewers. It appears that the media was talking about us, but no one was talking to us.

That’s where Pink Raygun comes in. Pink Raygun is for women like me who want to read about and talk about scifi, fantasy and horror in all of it’s forms. Pink Raygun is not just about female characters, it’s also about women working in all aspects of those genres, from make-up and costume design to special effects to writing. It’s Starlog meets Glamour, Babylon 5 meets Coupling, Isaac Asimov meets Helen Fielding. Pink Raygun is everything you’d expect from a genre news site, but girly.

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